


Exercises in being a Cobb

by mayachain



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Childhood, Families of Choice, Gen, Growing Up, Non-Linear Narrative, learning experiences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 14:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/pseuds/mayachain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six things Philippa and James were taught by dreamsharers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exercises in being a Cobb

* * *

On Philippa’s thirteenth birthday, Uncle Eames locks them both into her room and starts teaching her how to use make-up. 

They spend half an hour with their heads bent reverently over Mal’s old collection of lipsticks before deciding that even those that have not yet dried out are not exactly blonde Philippa’s colors. “I’m my own woman anyway,” Philippa says, and Eames smiles at her and doesn’t challenge her choice of words. She loves him for it.

The result is… _tasteful_. It’s not what Philippa would have gone for had she been left to her own devices, and she isn’t entirely sure if it’s the right description. _Sparse_ comes to mind. So does _invisible_. But Uncle Arthur kisses her hand as if she were a lady, and Dad doesn’t launch into another embarrassing speech about how fast she’s growing up, so she chooses to take Uncle Eames’ word for it. 

When Philippa goes to school the next day, at least four boys suddenly direct shy smiles at her. Secret letters start landing on her desk, and in each free period, someone actually comes up to her and says “Hi.” 

_Watch and learn,_ Uncle Arthur said, so she talks to all of them and smiles at them and observes. She gets the impression that they find her less scary than the other girls who are, if she is honest, kind of overdoing it.

By the end of the week, Philippa has her first boyfriend.

A few years down the line, James finds out that knowing how to apply make-up is an unconventional but surprisingly effective way to impress girlfriends.

* * *

They all pretend that the Cobb siblings are far too innocent to know how to forge their father’s signature.

* * *

The week before Philippa starts school, Arthur rents the dojo of an acquaintance and gives her her first lesson in self-defense, far away from her father's eyes. 

In theory, Dom could do this himself. The man is perfectly aware how important this is for a little girl with a father who still associates with criminals. However, to teach her properly he'd have to be willing to physically _hurt_ his daughter, even just a little bit, and he never wants to think of himself as capable of that.

Arthur hates striking Philippa the sixteen sessions before she manages to properly block his blows. He still breathes through the shitty feeling and does it, only holds back what he has to, because he knows the importance of _feeling_ what might happen if one slips up. 

Slowly, steadily, the little girl learns patience. By the time Arthur starts teaching her brother, Mal's daughter knows to weigh her options carefully, to wait for the right opportunity, to always, always plan ahead.

* * *

When Jamie is nine he comes back from a skiing trip with a broken leg. Despite the neatness of the break and the expensive high tech brace Uncle Arthur insists on, it hurts a _lot._

Two days pass before the doctor concedes that Jamie is having an unusual reaction to three different painkillers. “There are still alternatives we could try,” he says, but Dad has grown more and more disgusted with the hospital the longer Jamie remained in pain. It’s a relief that all he does is turn his back on the man with a decisive “No.”

When they get home there is a stranger in the kitchen who takes a vial of James’ blood into Mommy’s old lab. James gets to watch as Uncle Eames’ friend Yusuf plays around with evil smelling chemicals, gets to swallow a concoction that tastes a lot less foul than it smells and actually works, and is casually taught his first words of Swahili.

It starts and ends with a few swear words and rude questions, which is really all that interests Jamie as a nine-year-old. But he remembers this day a few years down the road when he meets the most beautiful girl he ever saw and overhears by way of careful lingering that her family is from Kenya.

“Can you teach me how to ask her out?” he asks Yusuf over Skype. Yusuf’s image on the computer screen grins at him wickedly but cautions that “there is a possibility that Swahili isn’t her actual first language, you know.”

A few days later James gathers all his courage and gets out the phrase with hardly any accent at all, terrified that he picked the wrong mother tongue. 

The beauty of the smile he gets in response defies any language.

* * *

Ariadne teaches Philippa that women aren’t weak.

Had she been alive, her mother would have done it. Her father and her grandfather and Arthur and Eames and Yusuf would never do anything to make her believe it. But even though Eames knows how to forge a woman and very, very occasionally dresses in very, very convincing real life drag, the important men in her life _arent’t women themselves._ Their examples can only go so far. Her grand-mère is a strong-willed but not exactly strong woman.

Ariadne, though, is an awe-inspiring name in the dreamshare business, an award-winning architect in her civilian life, happy with her boyfriend of ten years but most of all _independent_. 

She is also not afraid of Arthur in a rage. Unlike Philippa’s father.

* * *

The Cobb siblings never meet Robert Fischer in person. They never know how lucky they are that the man himself has no more than a vague ‘might have heard that name somewhere’ idea that there is even such a person as an extractor called Dominic Cobb. 

Nevertheless, when Philippa reads up on the author behind the Fischer Foundation, the articles written about him teach her that one can make it far even if one loses one’s mother at a young age, and that there are many ways to interpret one’s living parent’s actions.

James learns that it is possible to reject the legacy of your parents and create something entirely new out of nothing. The only time he ever enters a shared dream is the day Arthur gives him the heaviest mental defenses he knows.

* * *

Growing up as a Cobb means internalizing the following truths:  


  1. You can lose anything in the blink of an eye.
  2. Stability is an illusion.
  3. If they’re alive, people who love you will always, always come back to you. No matter how long it takes.



* * *


End file.
